Texas seniors' SAT scores still below U.S. peers

State's students improve in math, but reading marks decline nationwide

Published 5:30 am, Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Despite slight gains on the math portion of the SAT, college-bound seniors in Texas' 2006 class still lag behind their peers nationally on every section of the exam, including the new writing portion that debuted this year.

Texas students posted an average score of 487 — 10 points behind the national average — on the writing test, results released Tuesday show.

On the math test, Texas students increased their scores by four points to 506. Their U.S. counterparts saw their scores slip two points to 518.

Students in Texas and across the country saw their reading scores drop. Texas' average fell two points to 491. The U.S. average fell five points to 503.

"We are making progress on our math performance," state Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said in a written statement. "It is disappointing, though, that reading scores have dropped both in Texas and nationally."

Nationally, the combined reading and math scores fell seven points to an average of 1,021, the sharpest decline in three decades.

This year's drop — less than 1 percent of the total score — doesn't alarm College Board officials.

"Mathematically, it means almost nothing," former West Virginia Gov. Gaston Caperton, president of the nonprofit College Board, said during a conference call Tuesday. "We tend to overemphasize a few points here and a few points there."

Educators in the Houston area echoed the sentiment.

"We are not considering this year's scores a decline in the verbal area because two new standards — critical reading and writing — have replaced the verbal component," said Allison Matney, the Spring school district's director of planning and system accountability. "Until we have acquired two years worth of data under the new format, it will be difficult to make an accurate comparison."

Less trouble for girls

The biggest reason the scores fell, College Board officials said, is that fewer students opted to take the exam multiple times this year, a decrease that some testing officials attribute to students' uncertainty about the test's new format.

Girls appear to have had less trouble adjusting to the revamped test. Their 502 score on the new writing portion was 11 points higher than boys — the first time females have had the edge in any subject in at least 35 years, Olson said.

Nearly 1.5 million high schoolers took the three-hour, 45-minute test this year. Forty-seven percent of those students only took the test once, up 3 percent from 2005.

"The retesting pattern would have had a significant impact on scores," said Wayne Camara, vice president of research and psychometrics for the College Board. "We cannot pinpoint exactly what happened ... The best reason is when you introduce a new test like we did this year, students change their behavior."

Students who take the test a second time usually increase their scores about 30 points. They gain 20 or so more points when they take the test a third time, he said.

Nearly 10,000 fewer students even attempted the exam this year, lowering the national participation rate 1 percentage point to 48 percent of all graduating seniors.

Some area schools districts, including Aldine and Pasadena, posted noticeably lower participation rates.

Pasadena Superintendent Kirk Lewis said his district, which saw just one out of every five graduating seniors attempt the exam, is trying to do better.

Perfect score now 2,400

Many low-income students know they're headed to community colleges, which don't require the SAT for admission, he said.

In addition to featuring a new writing section that included both an essay and multiple choice, the test was also overhauled to include some Algebra II problems. On the renamed "critical reading" section, analogies were replaced with reading passages.

Scores on each section still range from 200 to 800 on each section of the SAT. And this year's math and reading scores are still comparable to past year's math and verbal scores. Scores from the new writing test are added on top, increasing a perfect score to 2,400.

Educators and parents should expect that these dramatic changes would cause scores to take a hit, experts said.

"We've just seen the largest change to the SAT in decades. We've now seen the largest drop in scores in decades," said Jeff Olson, research director for New York-based Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. "It's important to keep that context that we've got a new scale and it's reasonable to expect that we'd have different results."

Some students reported being exhausted after the longer test, although College Board officials said their scores didn't drop off at the end of the test. Other students struggled with the long critical reading passages, Olson said.

"Critical reading is a more difficult skill to learn than analogies. Vocabulary is something you can study, do flashcards on," he said. "For students this is a challenging task, but one they can get better at with practice."